In a conventional analog VTR, when a recording stop request is generated during a recording operation, the recording operation may be immediately stopped. When a user presses a video recording stop button during the recording operation, the analog VTR immediately stops the recording operation.
A digital VTR that compresses a video picked up by a monitoring camera using a JPEG system image compression device, for example, then stores data representing the compressed video, reads out, when the data corresponding to a predetermined capacity are stored in the memory, the data from the memory, and records the read data on a video tape has already been developed.
In this type of digital VTR, when the recording operation is immediately stopped when the recording stop request is generated during the recording operation, the video data which have been stored in the memory until the recording stop request is generated and have not been recorded yet on the video tape are not recorded on the video tape.
An object of the present invention is to provide a video recorder/reproducer and a video recording/reproducing method, in which video data which have been stored in a memory until a recording stop request is generated can be recorded on a recording medium.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a video recorder/reproducer and a video recording/reproducing method, in which in a case where a recording request is generated while video data which have been stored in a memory until a recording stop request is generated are read out of the memory after the recording stop request is issued, new video data can be prevented from being overwritten on video data which have not been read out yet in the memory (video data which have not been recorded yet on a recording medium).